Stop greenlighting Rudy Giuliani, Jeb Bush, Steve Doocy, Rick Santorum, and all the other clowns on your roster to stampede and distract us, repackage the narrative from anti-Black to anti-Christian.

[Crossing out lame ass excuses listed on chalkboard]

No, Lindsay Graham. This is not an attack on “religious liberty.” No, Bobby Jindal. What happened had nothing to do with the forces of “evil.” No, Rick Perry. It was not a damn “accident” induced by drugs. And no, Liberal Whitopians. This is not about gun control.

“It doesn’t take guns to kill Black people,” DAMES Kera Bolinik wrote. “It takes racism. And we are a nation founded on racism and have done nothing to combat it.”

Hence wipe the smug expression off your faces, and face the obvious truth: Dylann Roof, a high school drop out and avowed racist, set out one June evening to prey on and kill Black people, and that’s exactly what he did.

But here you go again, Whitopia, guardians and enthusiasts of White victimhood, nullifying the existence, impact, acidity, and escalation of white pathology, character deficiencies of which gnaw away at the heart of Emersonian virtue.

It’s bad enough that immediately following McKinney more Black girls in Fairfield, Ohio were manhandled and maced by thugs with badges, attempting to swim while Black.

It’s bad enough that the Dominican Republican plans to forcibly remove over 300,000 “undocumented” “dark skinned” field hands and domestic workers, charged with the existential crime of uglyifying the view from the apex of ontological, wealthy whiteness, or that the confederate flag still waves in South Carolina, because whitizens vigilantly defend this blood-stained emblem of black slavery as a symbol of “state’s rights.” I taught in the deep south for two years. There wasn’t a day that went by where seeing Dixieland’s southern cross on the back of car bumpers, plastered on license plates, or staved in some white hick’s yard, didn’t make me cringe.

And it’s bad enough that this past week a white woman doing blackface for 15 years, confounding the intellect of otherwise smart people, such as MSNBC host and professor Melissa Harris Perry, with ridiculous concepts such as cisBlack and transBlack, garnered more attention and empathy in a matter of minutes than thousands of actual Black women who go out everyday into a world telling and showing them that black women’s lives don’t matter.

But killing while white, that’s another matter altogether, granting the white murderer presumed innocence, medical sympathy, even assignment to a racist magistrate; pushing the unfuckingbelievable gall of you, Whitopia, to go analytically lightweight on everyone, to defend and rationalize your 21 year old Frankenstein, who felt so entitled, so superior, so omnipotent enough to stroll his white privileged ass into a sacred Black space, a historical sanctuary of unsuspecting, Jesus-loving black parishioners, praying to a “God” who, undoubtedly, throughout centuries of Black struggle, has saved yall’s asses from mass white killing sprees innumerable times.

Because, really, this isn’t about Dylann Roof, but white power. That’s the real, underhanded intent of these feigned efforts to understand Roof’s motivations. Mental illness has nothing to do with it. Protecting whiteness — that’s the goal.

All white lives must matter, be humanized, in order to maintain the illusion of an opposite — the black beast. And dehumanized Black bodies is always the subtext of contextualizing white victims. Meaning —

Black suspects can never be afforded humanization of their existence; their worlds can never be handled delicately on informative media outlets, like The View; their agonies, fears, frustrations, and anxieties never examined thoughtfully and compassionately; the mental illnesses they suffer from, while navigating through a social system rigged to guarantee their destruction, never discussed or weighed in criminal cases involving Blacks.

Black children can never be permitted childhoods; black boys, at every stage of life, must be men. All Blacks must be perfect victims or they forfeit any empathy. If they aren’t “saints” they warrant excessive force and death. Ultimately this means they must never do anything to disturb white fantasies or, under any circumstance, resist white supremacy.

Bottomline: never do ___________ while Black.

Driving, praying, walking, talking, swimming, eating, cheering, laughing, protesting, breathing, LIVING while Black means you’re guilty by default. Your existence is an error. Save for cultural pathology, no other explanation is given or valid. Because in Whitopia, when analyzing black crime, it’s perfectly forensic to say “Well, he’s Black” and stop there.

And, we all know “Black lives don’t matter” is what “he’s Black” implies.

Neither does Black history, except when preparing to disrespect or kill Blacks. Black churches have been the target of white terrorism as far back as Reconstruction. The 1963 bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church is arguably the most famous example.

Thus, no one is at all surprised that this massacre unfolded in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal, a church founded in 1816 by slave insurrectionist Denmark Vesey who, six years later, was executed for organizing one among thousands of slave revolts against white planters. No one is surprised that it took place in a church that served as a relay station for black escapees seeking to liberate themselves from the slave south during Underground Railroad. No one is surprised that it took place in a space where Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and other activists at the forefront of the black struggle for civil and human rights, rallied the masses to put their lives on the line for the New America they were looking to build.

Nor will it stop black folks and white allies holding it down at the grassroots, from pulling out their androids or Iphones, clicking that record button, uploading video after video, putting your white pathology on blast.

Nor will it dissuade black professors from remaining outspoken about “the white problem” or taking trolls to task in these virtual streets.

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Antwan is an educator, cultural critic, actor, and writer for Wear Your Voice Mag (WYV), where he focuses on the dynamics of class, race, gender, politics, and pop culture. Prior to joining the team at WYV, he was an adjunct professor in the African American Studies Department at Valdosta State University in southern Georgia, where he taught African American Literature. He has traveled the U.S. and U.K. showcasing a fifty-five minute, one-person play titled Whitewash, which focuses on the state of black men in the post-civil rights era. Antwan received his B.A. in English and Literature from California State University, Dominguez Hills, and M.A. in African American Studies from University of California, Los Angeles. He is a Ronald E. McNair Scholar and NAACP theater nominee.